


cast my line upward into the air

by purrfectj



Series: resign yourself to the influence of the earth [4]
Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game), Walden - Henry David Thoreau
Genre: Commerce, Fishing, Gen, Ocean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 12:24:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6519202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purrfectj/pseuds/purrfectj
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tess spends hard-earned money and meets Willy, the sailor. Pierre might find the poor girl a bit odd.</p>
<p>This is part 4 of a many-part series exploring Stardew Valley, its inhabitants, and its newest addition, a female farmer named Tess. It's written in present tense and is rooted in my love for the farm where I grew up and my lifelong love affair with Henry David Thoreau's Walden: Or, Life in the Woods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cast my line upward into the air

Everything, Tess learns, is for sale. Before, when she was a cog in the wheel of wholesale domination, this would have bothered her, these sacrifices on the altar of commerce of pine cones and maple seeds and rocks and bundles of fiber but has she plans and plots to fund and while the work isn’t mentally stimulating, it leaves her extra time to daydream, castles in the air and rows in the ground and a jaundiced eye on her funds. 

Her first purchase is a fancy toolbelt and a large rucksack. The rucksack is to replace her backpack, the backpack that busted not a month into the parsnip harvest while full of the disgusting, dirty white vegetables, the toolbelt so she isn’t constantly having to trudge back in from the back forty to the toolshed and switch out the axe for the maul or the hoe for the watering can and so they are really necessities that feel like her first splurge as she plunks down cash, a lot of cash for someone who hasn’t had meat for about three weeks worth of meals now, and grins triumphantly at Pierre across the counter. 

Pierre might think she’s a little crazy, his eyebrows nearly to his hairline as he rings her up and hands her back her change and the heavy-duty canvas and leather rucksack and the supple leather toolbelt but she is well-pleased and would whistle as she leaves with her bounty if, in fact, she could. 

She used to know how, before, with her tiny, straight, perfect baby teeth and her sweet, pouting baby mouth. She doesn’t remember the ability to make music with her lips, only has the hazy memories fed to her by her mother before she died, Chanel No. 5 and the click-clack of heels on their worn wooden floors in the sprawling, drafty Victorian, Dad in his recliner sleeping with his hand flung over his face after work and a bourbon on the rocks, the smell of mediocre cooking and lemon Pledge, the cat who shed and claimed every surface as his. Petey was his name, some reference that always made Dad frown and Mom laugh and run her hand up his arm, leaning in to kiss his whiskery cheek. 

Love had been abundant in her house. Love and comfort and praise but not so much common sense, her father a doer but not a planner, her mother a dreamer and not a doer, and Tess somewhere in the middle, content to laze about her room and think of the hazy, faraway tomorrow as when her life would begin. It’s certainly taken a quick, unexpected swerve but, really, maybe that’s what she needed, a swift, hard, rough shove at the fork in the road, a reminder that, as John Lennon croons in her ear, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” 

The Beatles, together and separately, ride along with her in the strong golden light as she cruises down to the beach, her voice lifting occasionally to sing the words she knows, particularly “she’s got a ticket to ride” and “now the darkness only stays the night-time” and “makes you give in and cry” and “with every mistake we must surely be learning”. It probably says something that she loves Harrison and McCartney more than Lennon and remembers Starr as the conductor on her second-favorite children’s show. 

Fresh off her triumph at Pierre’s, she has enough time to finally introduce herself to Willy, the local authority on all things fishing and ocean and river and lake, fishing which she’s been told can fill her belly and her wallet, and since she certainly likes eating fish and is game to try the gutting and cleaning and the actual fishing and money is probably a thing now and forever, amen, and god does she want to see the ocean, she bikes down the pier. 

It’s stunning, big and blue and expansive, and it smells like dead fish and salt and her grandfather’s cologne, and Tess has the sudden, irrational urge to comb her fingers through her braid and leap from the end of the pilings, to sink and sink and sink until she is weightless, buoyant, surrounded and protected by the pulse and the pound, battered but never broken. “Fanciful bullshit,” she says aloud and nearly swings around with a punch at the ready in startle and embarrassment when a harsh bark of a laugh sounds from directly behind where she is perched precariously on her heels over the water. 

“Sorry, sorry, girly, didnae mean ta sneak up on ya.” The man’s voice is hoarse but not deep, caught somewhere behind his sternum, and he doesn’t smile even as his ocean-blue eyes twinkle merrily at her from the weathered squint of his face. His beard is wild and woolly and puts Tess in mind of Redbeard and Bluebeard and pirates and privateers even as he reaches up and fiddles with the poor-boy cap on his head, poking at it until, she assumes, it gives in and lies like he wants on the abundant and unruly waves of his hair. His other hand holds a pipe, smoke still curling into the air, and Tess has a brief sensory tingle in her nose, tobacco and coffee and mint. 

This is Willy. He calls her “girly” even after she gives him her name, tells her about his recent haul and his new rod with a squint that passes for his idea of a smile, and refuses her stunned, fumbling attempts to say thank you when he gives her a well-loved, perfectly balanced bamboo pole. “Throw ta hook in ta water, wait fer a bite, start reelin’ but not too fast,” is his advice and he means for her to do it now, while he watches, so she does, her arm trembling with nerves and excitement. 

“Herring,” he calls it when she manages, after ten bajillion tries, to get a damn fish to stay on the line long enough for her to haul it in, and Tess stares at him incredulously when he pronounces it too small to keep and throws it back in. Something about her frustration must communicate itself clearly, surely not because she makes a rude noise and says something very unladylike, because Willy does his amused squint and smacks her on the middle of the back. “Dinnae give up, girly. You’ll get it.” 

Tess stays until the moon, half-bloated and controlling, beams down on the tide that thrums at the frequency of her heart. 


End file.
